Anthropic invests $1.5M in the Python Software Foundation (opens in new tab)

Python has a terseness that is hard to rival. I think that was a major selling point: its constructs and use of whitespace mean that a valid Python program looks pretty close to the pseudo-code one might write to reason out the problem before writing it in another language.

Is it static or dynamic? Whatever rust is that python isn’t.

They clearly meant a statically typed language. Yes Python is Strongly Typed, but I think we all knew what they meant.

I don’t get this argument because if we put the effort to get it typed, we don’t get one of the best benefits - performance.

Or ty: https://astral.sh/blog/ty

All this but none of the performance benefits.

It's not incorrect, but in the context of the given Hacker News submission it reads as "why fund Python at all?"

> Most people are using MyPy or an alternative typechecker, and the community frowns on those who aren’t.

That's not like a widespread/by-default/de-facto standard across the ecosystem, by a wide margin. Browse popular/trending Python repositories and GitHub sometime and I guess you can see.

Most of the AI stuff released is still basically using conda or pip for dependencies, more times than not, they don't even share/say what Python version they used. It's basically still the wild west out there.

Never had anyone "frown" towards me for not using MyPy or any typechecker either, although I get plenty of that from TS fans when I refuse to adopt TS.

It's a pretty nice best-of-both-worlds arrangement. The type information is there, but the program still runs without it (unless one is doing something really fancy, since it does actually make a runtime construct that can be introspected; some ORMs use the static type data to figure out database-to-object bindings). So you can go without types for prototyping, and then when you're happy with your prototype you can let mypy beat you up until the types are sound. There is a small nonzero cost to using the types at runtime (since they do create metadata that doesn't get dropped like in most languages with a static compilation step, like C++ or TypeScript).

I can name an absolute handful of languages I've used that have that flexibility. Common LISP comes to mind. But in general you get one or the other option.

Every single financial institution on Wall Street, the City of London, Amsterdam, Tokyo, Dubai and so on, uses Python. Very few contribute.

I've worked at a few that use the 'mold' linker to dramatically reduce their build times. Again, very few contribute. In this particular case, I managed to get one former employer to make a donation.

But the list goes on.

Short arms, deep pockets, as the saying goes.

Money has limited impact and has all sorts of drawbacks.

A more impactful change from firms might be to celebrate and reward community contributions of their own employees. This can establish a more productive culture than just money. If an engineering company is willing to donate money (yay!), perhaps consider making sure that employees are celebrated for contributions they make in a manner that is similar to how we currently celebrate monetary transactions.

For an example of the opposite, Google laid off their entire Python team, something that also made HN front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40171125

We can both applaud the effort and indicate it’s not enough. Two things can be true simultaneously.

don't compare everyone with your mom, shepard

And if this money improves PyPI security (part of the focus), that reduces the chance of Claude Code adding malicious packages to a code base (a well publicized case of this could be a big PR headache for Anthropic). This donation is likely much better leverage than trying to somehow add mitigation at the Claude Code level.

Care to elaborate on how $1.5M makes Python better?

This is a step to take control and move in a direction that will profit them greatly.

May or may not benefit the community.

And they come in a variety of bindingness. I didn’t notice any details in this link which makes me think this is mostly a handshake deal, but it wouldn’t be at all unusual for there to be some auditing mechanisms on a quarterly/yearly cycle.

For example, Wikimedia just recently claimed that they can’t chase some political project that critics wanted them to because most of their funds are earmarked-for/invested-in specific projects. So it does happen with US-based tech non-profits to at least some extent.

That link shows the significance of this Anthropic donation too:

> $1.5 million over two years would have been quite a lot of money for us, and easily the largest grant we’d ever received.

Where are you getting these numbers? Looking at the PSFs Report for 2024 [0], 50% of their expenses went to pycon. Would you consider that outreach? I believe conferences are very important as part of the health of a language, and reading the definition of outreach[1], I would not classify the conference as that. The second highest amount of expenses (27.1%) went to (surprise!) "Packaging Work Group/Infrastructure/Other", i.e. pypi, pip etc... "Outreach & Education" was only 2.8% of 12.9% of expenses, i.e. 0.3612%, which is $17846 (actual dollars, not thousands like in the report.)

[0] https://www.python.org/psf/annual-report/2024/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outreach

> They refused to invest in packaging to the extent that a separate company (astral) had to do it for them

uv didn't just happen in a vacuum, there has been lots of investment in the Python packaging ecosystem that has enabled it (and other tools) to try and improve the shortcomings of Python and packaging.

There's PEP 518 [1] for build requirements, PEP 600 [2] for manylinux wheels, PEP 621 [3] for pyproject.toml, PEP 656 [4] for musl wheels platform identifiers, PEP 723 [5] for inline script metadata.

Without all this uv wouldn't be a thing and we would be stuck with pip and setuptools or a bunch of more bandaid hacks on top making the whole thing brittle.

[1] https://peps.python.org/pep-0518/ [2] https://peps.python.org/pep-0600/ [3] https://peps.python.org/pep-0621/ [4] https://peps.python.org/pep-0654/ [5] https://peps.python.org/pep-0723/

I don't know much about the Linux Foundation if I'm being honest, even though I've been a 24/7 Linux user for decades, but they seemingly don't have the same image in the ecosystem, at least not close to how people see Mozilla today.

Why is that? Is there lessons to be learned from the Linux Foundation how to actually effectively and responsibly manage that sort of money, in those types of projects?

MIT was already using Python by 2009[1]; I think it's been one of the "standard" teaching languages for well over a decade at this point.

(By most metrics, Python became "big" in the mid-late 2000s, which is why the Python 3 transition was so painful.)

[1]: https://www.wisdomandwonder.com/link/2110/why-mit-switched-f...

To a large extent they do and always have. It's not as broad or fair as it should be[1], but for almost any economically important project all the major contributors and maintainers are on the payroll of one of the big tech interests or a foundation funded by them.

The hippies writing that software may not be compensated at the level you'd expect given the value they provide, but they'll never go hungry.

[1] LLVM and Linux get more cash than they can spend. GNU stuff is comparatively impoverished because everyone assumes they'd do it for free anyway. Stuff that ships on a Canonical desktop or RHEL default install gets lots of cash but community favorites like KDE need to make their own way, etc... Also just to be clear: node is filled with povertyware and you should be extremely careful what you grab from npm.

Really simple fix: social pressure and expectations should be that every company that uses open source pays a fixed amount of their revenue (is 0.1% low enough to be negligible for the companies). Companies that don't should shunned.

Actually, since 2022, Nadia Asparouhova :)

From a 2022 email:

> (P.S. I have a new last name! Still transitioning everything over, but I’m now Nadia Asparouhova.)

> (Also makes me wonder if they still have a Microsoft employee running the PSF… always thought that was odd.)

You might be confusing the Python Steering Council - responsible for leadership of Python language development - with the PSF non-profit there.

The PSF is lead by a full-time executive director who has no other affiliation, plus an elected board of unpaid volunteer directors (I'm one of them).

Microsoft employees occasionally get voted into the board, but there is a rule to make sure a single company doesn't have more than 2 representatives on the board at any one time,

The board also elects a chair/president - previously that was Dawn Wages who worked at Microsoft for part of that time (until March 2025 - Dawn was chair up to October), today it's Jannis Leidel from Anaconda.

Meanwhile the Python steering council is entirely separate from the PSF leadership, with their own election mechanism voted on by Python core contributors. They have five members, none of whom currently work for Microsoft (but there have been Microsoft employees in the past.)

Microsoft was serious about supporting Python as far back as 2006, because IronPython was a real effort in Redmond. (I'm wondering how they think of it now.)

It happened quite a while back, most of us knew what direction this was going (Claude Code uses Bun, OpenCode uses Bun, they need Bun to work the best for Claude Code)

Kinda crazy that the top level "Visionary Sponsor" is a donation level of $160k. There's also 0 sponsors at the $100k level. I was also surprised to see Netflix at $5k and Jane Street at $17k. Maybe they should give more but there's a lot of names absent and that says more